2021: Creating a Lexicon of Future
R is for Rewilding
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Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation. It’s about letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes. Through rewilding, wildlife’s natural rhythms create wilder, more biodiverse habitats. ~ What is Rewilding?
Investing in Our Shared Future
According to Matthews, investors are keen to put their money into in the “natural capital space”, with consumer demand for wilderness and wellbeing holidays, public desire for action to save nature, and new payments for restoring soils, preventing floods and sequestering carbon enshrined in the environment bill.
Matthews said he was inspired by his experiences watching nature restoration and rewilding in southern Africa. “We all think this is new but it’s been happening around the globe very successfully for a long time. My goal with the Real Wild Estates Company is to make restoring nature profitable and viable.
“Rewilding isn’t about having wolves outside your door, it’s getting back to what our grandparents would have seen as perfectly normal. If I can’t make this work I need to be shot, because we’ve got real tailwinds behind us to make this happen.” ~ Forget fine art: investors urged to put their money into rewilding
Rewilding and Climate Change
Modern humans evolved on Earth and began interacting with other species about 200,000 years ago, but we have only recently distanced ourselves from the natural world. This distance is part of the reason why our activities have ramped up, causing harm to the environment around us.
“It is only since the Industrial Revolution and the rapid development of modern agriculture that we have been able to be less reliant on, and hence live somewhat apart from, the natural world in which we evolved,” Costello said. “In that process we have wiped out millions of other species, destroyed much of the earth’s productive soils, polluted our waterways, and introduced long lasting toxins into our lands, waters, and bodies.”
But rewilding can help reverse some of these unintended consequences. One method concerns ecological restoration, or helping areas that have been damaged recover. By reintroducing native plant species that have been lost, planting trees, and stopping human activities that degrade an area — through exploiting resources or polluting waterways — ecosystems can better regulate the environment. For this reason, rewilding is a nature-based solution for fighting climate change. ~ What Is ‘Rewilding’ and How Can It Help Restore Our Planet’s Biodiversity?
